Enterprise Resource Pool from Active Directory

[JodyJ]

We are in the middle of both a conversion to MS Project Server 2003 (from a
completely different non-MS tool) and a conversion from Lotus Notes to MS
Exchange. We really want to create and maintain our Enterprise Resource Pool
by syncing with Active Directory however, our Project implementation will be
ready several months before Active Directory will be up and running.

I'm concerned that if I go create an Enterprise Resource Pool and begin
actively using MS Project Server and then later want to eliminate these
resources and sync from Active Directory, I'm going to have huge problems on
my existing projects.

Does anyone have any experience with this issue? Any advice?

 

[Patrick Feltz]

Jody,
I would be inclined to agree. if you manually create users in you MS
Project deployment (like I did) and then want to sync with AD groups later
(like I did) you will have a bunch of duplicates... to add to your
dilemma, there isn't any "find and replace" there might be a merge where you
can merge two users but I didn't like (or trust) the results too much so I
ended up removing all the users that were created in MS Project and synching
with AD instead...

I recommend playing around with it a little. If you have AD up and
running at all, just create a global group and put a few test users in
there to see what happens when you try to "combine" two users...

hope that helps.

 

[Jonathan Sofer - MCP]

Jody,

AD synch is a good idea in theory but is a touchy tool from my experience.
For example, it cannot handle synching an AD account with any square
brackets in it. The synch will fail.

As far as having duplicates, I believe it handles that pretty well. Just
make sure that when you create your Enterprise Resource Pool, that you also
populated all the resources with their correct Windows User Account. When
you eventually are ready to run the AD synch with the enterprise resource
pool, the synch will find the match on the Windows User Account and will
consolidate the two systems. Again, it will not create any duplicates
resources as long as you have the WUA populated ahead of time in the
enterprise resource accounts. It will create duplicates if you do not have
the WUA populated as it has no way of knowing that this resource is already
in the pool. Make sense? Of course, that said, I would do some very
thorough testing of this and other test scenarios.

Hope that helps.